The Pacific Circuit

“Terrific … Fine-grained social history forms the base of [The Pacific Circuit]. Madrigal weaves a contextual structure built atop the life and times of a single person. That structure is the story of modern global capitalism literally moving back and forth across the vastness of the Pacific Rim. Two prisms are critical to considering the tapestry created here. The book would lack half its power if it told only the global or only the local story. Each illuminates the other, with the writer’s talent for holding the whole thing together constantly at work. To say this is hard to do is an understatement. But it’s done so well here … Oakland as described, analyzed, and measured here is a revelation.”–William Deverell, Alta

“An incisive look at the invisible forces of consumption shaping not just a single city, but our world.”–Kirkus Reviews

“This glorious, gripping urban history manages to be both close in on the details of local politics, character, and place and panoramic in its survey of what they mean and why they matter and how they connect to the rest of the planet, which is just to say that Oakland is about everything that matters most in this moment and everyone should read The Pacific Circuit.”–Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell’s Roses

“A dazzlingly imaginative (and surprisingly hopeful) telling of how everything–our cities, our globalized economy, our planet–ended up this way–and how it all started in Oakland. The Pacific Circuit is a marvel of real-life storytelling, making the world around us feel vast and magical, full of casual treachery as well as spaces of hope.”–Hua Hsu, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Stay True

“I’ve been lucky to encounter great books about local history and great books about the global networks that undergird our daily experience, but The Pacific Circuit is one of a precious few that tackle both at once. Madrigal’s ability to connect the local to the global so completely represents a masterful feat of research and storytelling. It also models a challenging and urgently needed way of seeing – one that’s as crucial for understanding the places we love as it is for imagining their futures.”–Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time

“The Pacific Circuit gives us a thrilling new kind of historical storytelling. Madrigal masterfully weaves together the financial, technological, and geological forces that shaped his hometown, and shows us how individual lives were shaped by these powerful currents. It’s a story about race, urban planning, imperialism, neighborhood activism, technological innovation–the entire complex system, from the hyperlocal to the global, that gives rise to the places we live.”–Steven Johnson, author of The Ghost Map and How We Got to Now

Alexis Madrigal is a journalist who lives in Oakland, California. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a cofounder of the COVID Tracking Project. Previously, he was the editor in chief of Fusion and a staff writer at Wired. He has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Information School and its Center for the Study of Technology, Science, and Medicine as well as an affiliate with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.